Not long ago the New York Times ran a story that described a $156 French-made Lancelot costume that you could buy for a baby and hang as a decoration until a future Halloween. My first reaction to the article was: A three-figure outfit for trick-or-treating? During a worldwide financial crisis? The idea might make some people want to impale the author of the Times story on Excalibur.

Then I started thinking about what children tend to own instead: superhero gear. Some parents clearly have spent far more than $156 on, say, Spider-man toys, games, sheets, pillowcases, T-shirts and more. And didn’t the greatest Knight of the Round Table en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancelot deserve as much respect as Spidey? Something to think about, isn’t it? The costumes are made by Banticoot-Lapin web.tiscali.it/bandicootlapinparis/english/indexuk.htm and sold at John Derian in New York (which inexplicably has mislabed Lancelot’s hood and suit as a Camen outfit on its site www.johnderian.com/index_home.html). Bandicoot-Lapin makes more than a dozen other costumes based on fairy-tale or mythological characters, so its site could inspire your homemade literary costumes, too.